A novel elastic optical path network that utilizes bitrate-specific anchored frequency slot arrangement.

We propose a novel elastic optical path network where each specific bitrate signal uses its own dedicated fixed grid and one edge of its frequency grid is anchored at a specific frequency. Numerical evaluations using various bitrate signal patterns and network topologies show that the network proposal can almost match the performance of conventional flexible grid networks, while greatly mitigating the hardware requirements: it allows the use of the tunable filters for the fixed grid systems.